Psychology

Kristin H. Lagattuta is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan. Dr. Lagattuta’s research focuses on developmental changes in children’s knowledge about connections between life history, mind, and emotion. This has included studies on children’s understanding of emotions and decisions caused by being reminded about past events and by forecasting future events, children's reasoning about the impact of past experience on people's thoughts and interpretations of events, children’s knowledge about causes of fear and worry and strategies that can help alleviate negative emotions, children’s beliefs about the effects of emotions on thinking, and children’s reasoning about the influence of desires and thoughts on decisions and emotions (including situations involving prohibitive rules, prosocial moral dilemmas, and intergroup relations).  Additional research examines the effect of emotional stimuli on children's attention, reasoning, and executive control.  Her most recent work is pioneering methods for combining eye-tracking and traditional social-cognitive measures to gain new insight into development and individual differences in children’s and adults' social-cognitive reasoning.